Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Computing’ Category

I know that computers are supposed to go down in price on a regular basis but the drops recently seem even more extreme than usual unless, of course, it’s just me keeping more of an eye on them than normal.

For instance, the Acer Aspire One that I bought in early December is now replaced by a model that comes with twice the RAM and 50% more storage space for exactly the same money. Now, that’s pretty typical of computers but the impact on the lower end of the market is a little more extreme.

The somewhat less cute version that Maplin originally put out for £160 at one stage came with all of 128MB RAM, 2GB space and a 7″ screen was obviously severely overpriced when the 512MB RAM, 8GB storage and 9″ display Acer dropped to £135 so the Maplin price has pretty much collapsed to £99 and may have a little further to fall yet. Actually, it’s getting to the point where I’m starting to think that perhaps it’s time to consider getting one to leave in the living room to read the paper on or whatever.

And, of course, these price drops and performance improvements can only continue. Next year we can expect that the Acer will be down to close to that £99 price point with potentially the Maplin or something similar coming in around £50.

Not so long ago just about every company manufacturing portable computers seemed to offer a whole raft of options with the basic model so you could have one or two batteries, or you could have a CD drive (’twas pre-DVD then) instead of one of the batteries or you could have…. well, loads of different things that probably served to seriously complicate the buying decision for most people.

However, these days the portable is very much a standard issue device with not a whole lot of uniqueness to really distinguish the products from different manufacturers. There still remains some specialism of course but mainly that’s severely limited so, for example, Sony tend to specialise in expensive multimedia models and, as always, Apple plough their own furrow in the marketplace. A year ago I’d have added that for a mini portable it was Asus but that marketplace is now totally swamped by offerings from the other manufacturers.

What’s missing from that sameness are the little things. For instance, I’m looking for a portable right now and would like to have an AV socket on it yet there doesn’t seem to be such a beastie these days and instead some have HDMI connections which are handy but it would have been nice to have been able to connect camcorders and whatnot that are only a few years old and don’t have HDMI. Likewise, I’d have liked to have been able to continue to use some PCMCIA devices but everyone seems to have moved on to ExpressCard slots now.

On the software front it’s nice to see that several flavours of Unix are on offer these days, notably on the netbooks of course in that it would seem pretty ridiculous to be spending far more to buy the wordprocessing software than it did to buy the computer.

I’ve been looking at the ASUS range for quite a while now but really couldn’t see the point of getting a baby computer with only at most 20GB storage. Sure, it would have sounded a lot a few years ago but when you start thinking about photos and videos it just doesn’t cut it these days and that’s before you even think about software.

All these little computers are tagged as “netbooks” meaning that they’re intended primarily for use as portable Internet browsers. Certainly for those with 8GB or less “disc” space you’d not get much in the way of applications loaded up but when you’ve 120GB of hard drive to play with what you’ve got is a smaller version of a laptop ie they can do pretty much everything that their bigger brothers can do.

Typically these small computers come loaded with a custom version of Linux although you can also get versions with XP and Vista loaded too (they’re usually £20 or so more expensive). The Linux versions usually come with OpenOffice (the Linux equivalent of Microsoft Office), photo and video display software and, of course, games. In other words, the software that most people use. Note that the Linux software is free you don’t get hit with the extra cost of buying MS Office that you would with the XP or Vista versions.

Out of the box the Aspire One seems like a closed system but it’s easy enough to open things up: just press Alt+F2, type xfce-setting-show and press enter, click on Desktop, then Behavior and finally Show desktop menu on right-click. Now, right-clicking on the desktop will give you the full range of options and in particular going to System, Add/Remove software will give you oodles of choices to extend the functionality of your system.

Incidently, don’t think that going down the Linux route will cut you off from the Microsoft world because there are emulation packages available that’ll let you run pretty much all XP/Vista based software.

Most of the time you don’t really notice the rate at which technology moves along but when you dig out a piece of not-that-old technology and try to bring it up to date you can really be surprised.

Take my old SuperVHS tapes for instance. I was recording my holiday trips on those for nearly ten years and thought that it was time I sat down and got them copied onto the computer before the old SuperVHS player packs in and I lose them.

Anyway, I’ve been meaning to do that for a while now but only just got around to making a serious start on the task a few weeks back thanks to a new version of a TV to PC interface I bought recently for another purpose. The first surprise was that although the new device is much smaller than the PVR that it replaces, there’s now no noticeable delay after you press the record button and when it begins recording. Well, it was bound to be faster so I suppose that shouldn’t have surprised me.

What’s more amazing though is that although each 45 minute tape takes up around 1.2GB, that’s no longer a large chunk of disc space. At the time I bought the SuperVHS camcorder, the largest amount of space that I had available was 20MB (in 1993); the machine that I’m typing this on has 200GB ie ten thousand times the storage capacity. I originally thought that I’d have to copy the “tapes” onto an external drive but in fact the internal drive has more than enough space to hold all of them.

Shouldn’t I be copying them off onto DVD? I will be in due course but I think it’s more reliable to keep them on the internal disc and make them part of the normal backup process. There’s much more chance that I’ll be able to view them years from now if I do that: on DVD chances are that 1) they could get scratched and rendered unreadable and 2) DVDs may become obsolete and therefore unreadable in perhaps as little as 10 years.

And I did buy that new external drive but then I buy a new one every year as part of my normal backup plan. 250GB in a nice pocket sized drive is fantastic.